Editorial - the New York Times
Cancer’s High Toll on the Uninsured
Published: September 11, 2007
The American Cancer Society’s new advertising campaign urging access to quality health care for all Americans will bring home in gripping terms what happens to people without health insurance. When it comes to dealing with cancer, any delay in detection or treatment, as is common among the uninsured or poorly insured, can be fatal.
The society decided to devote its entire advertising budget this year to the problem of inadequate health coverage after reaching a stark and sobering conclusion. It has no hope of meeting its goal of reducing cancer death rates by 50 percent, and incidence rates by 25 percent, from 1990 to 2015 unless cancer patients gain quicker access to screening and treatment. As Kevin Sack recently reported in The Times, the society’s chief executive, John Seffrin, believes that, unless the health care system is fixed, “lack of access will be a bigger cancer killer than tobacco.”
The society’s campaign is rooted in solid research showing that uninsured patients suffering from cancers of the breast, larynx and mouth were much more likely to have these cancers diagnosed at an advanced stage, when they are less curable, than were patients with private insurance. As a consequence, they faced more difficult and more expensive treatments, a diminished quality of life and a greater risk of death.
Many patients are impoverished by their battles against cancer. A survey last year found that one of every four families afflicted by cancer used most or all of its savings in the battle, including one in five families with insurance. Their limited benefits could not come close to meeting the high costs of cancer treatment.
With 47 million Americans lacking health insurance and millions more with only limited coverage, it is imperative to provide adequate, affordable, readily available health coverage to everyone. The cancer society doesn’t prescribe how to do that, but its campaign leaves little doubt it must be done.
2 comments:
See:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118972648229127086.html
Interesting that with the US having the HIGHEST cancer survival rates in the world, that the ACS decides that is not good enough.
"Last month, the largest ever international survey of cancer survival rates showed that in the U.S., women have a 63% chance of living at least five years after diagnosis, and men have a 66% chance -- the highest survival rates in the world. These figures reflect the care available to all Americans, not just those with private health coverage. In Great Britain, which has had a government-run universal health-care system for half a century, the figures were 53% for women and 45% for men, near the bottom of the 23 countries surveyed."
And this quote as well:
"The same is true for mammograms. In the U.S., 84% of women ages 50-64 get them regularly, a higher percentage than in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, and far higher than the 63% of women in the U.K. The high rate of screening in the U.S. reflects access as well as educational efforts by the American Cancer Society and others."
And we WANT government-run universal health-care system??????
that argument is laughable and you know it. No one is saying Americans who can afford good healthcare can go get it. It is called access and prevention...
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